list 50 women little girls should admire instead of symbols of stupidity and weakness

is part of the reason that I have an ongoing love affair with VANITY FAIR magazine.

Photographer. Born Anna-Lou Leibovitz, on October 2, 1949, in Westbury, Connecticut. She was one of the six children born to Sam, an Air Force lieutenant, and Marilyn Leibovitz, a modern dance instructor. In 1967, Leibovitz enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute, where (although initially studying painting) she developed a love for photography.

After living briefly on an Israeli kibbutz, Leibovitz returned to the U.S., in 1970, and applied for a job with the start-up rock music magazine Rolling Stone. Impressed with Leibovitz’s portfolio, editor Jann Wenner offered her a job as a staff photographer. Within two years, the 23-year-old Leibovitz was promoted to chief photographer—a title she would hold for the next 10 years. Her position with the magazine afforded her the opportunity to accompany the Rolling Stones band on their 1975 international tour.

While with Rolling Stone, Leibovitz developed her trademark technique, which involved the use of bold primary colors and surprising poses. Wenner has credited her with making many Rolling Stone covers collector’s items, most notably an issue that featured a nude John Lennon curled around his fully clothed wife, Yoko Ono. Taken on December 8, 1980, Leibovitz’s photo of the former Beatle was shot just hours before his death.

In 1983, Leibovitz left Rolling Stone and began working for the entertainment magazine Vanity Fair. With a wider array of subjects, Leibovitz’s photographs for Vanity Fair ranged from presidents to literary icons to teen heartthrobs. To date, a number of Vanity Fair covers have featured Leibovitz’s stunning—and often controversial—portraits of celebrities. Demi Moore (very pregnant and very nude) and Whoopi Goldberg (half-submerged in a bathtub of milk) are among the most remembered actresses to grace the cover in recent years. Known for her ability to make her sitters become physically involved in her work, one of Leibovitz’s most famous portraits is of the late artist Keith Haring, who painted himself like one of his canvases for the photo.

During the late 1980s, Leibovitz started to work on a number of high-profile advertising campaigns. The most notable was the American Express “Membership” campaign, for which her portraits of celebrity cardholders, like Elmore Leonard, Tom Selleck, and Luciano Pavarotti, earned her a 1987 Clio Award.

In 1991, Leibovitz’s collection of over 200 color and black-and-white photographs were exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Later that year, a book was published to accompany the show titled Photographs: Annie Leibovitz 1970-1990. In 1996, Leibovitz was chosen as the official photographer of the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. A compilation of her black-and-white portraits of American athletes, including Carl Lewis and Michael Johnson, were published in the book Olympic Portraits (1991).

Widely considered one of America’s best portrait photographers, Annie Leibovitz published the book Women (1999), which was accompanied by an essay by friend and novelist Susan Sontag. With its title subject matter, Leibovitz presented an array of female images from Supreme Court Justices to Vegas showgirls to coal miners and farmers. Currently, many of her original prints are housed in various galleries throughout the United States.

In 2005, the Brooklyn Museum of Art did a retrospective on her work entitled “Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005.” As busy as ever, Annie Leibovitz continues to be in demand as portrait photographer, often capturing arresting images of today’s celebrities.

Annie Leibovitz is the mother of three children. At the age of 51, she had her daughter, Sarah. In 2005, her twin daughters, Susan and Samuelle, were born with the help of a surrogate mother.

She is the reson that I majored in Journalism. She was the keynote speaker at a conference @ my college when I was starting my 2nd year. She moved me so much that I knew this is what I wanted to do.

Soledad O’Brien is an anchor and special correspondent for CNN: Special Investigations Unit, reporting hour-long documentaries throughout the year and filing in-depth series on the most important ongoing and breaking news stories for all major CNN programs. She also covers political news as part of CNN’s “Best Political Team on Television.”

Most recently, O’Brien has reported for CNN Presents: Black in America, a sweeping CNN on-air and digital initiative breaking new ground in revealing the current state of Black America 40 years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The landmark programming features six hours of documentaries and weekly reports with a focus on fresh analysis from new voices about the real lives behind the stereotypes, statistics and identity politics that frequently frame the national dialogue about Black America.

O’Brien joined CNN in July 2003 as the co-anchor of the network’s flagship morning program, American Morning, and distinguished herself by reporting from the scene on the transformational stories that broke on her watch. Her efforts following Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami in Phuket, Thailand, have earned her numerous awards and critical acclaim.

O’Brien served as CNN’s point person for President George W. Bush’s visit to Mexico, delivering a series of eye-opening reports on conditions south of the border that fuel illegal immigration to the United States. She also anchored and reported a highly acclaimed CNN: Special Investigations Unit documentary featuring a never-before-seen look at King’s private writings, notes and teachings, which represent the foundation of his life’s work as a preacher and human rights activist. Her initiative, “Children of the Storm,” provided video cameras to young Katrina survivors so they could tell their stories of trial and triumph in their own words and images.

For CNN’s Katrina coverage, O’Brien’s daily reports about the impact of Hurricane Katrina included an in-depth interview with former FEMA chief Michael Brown. She also covered the London terrorism attacks in July 2005, and in December 2004, she was among a handful of CNN anchors sent to Phuket, Thailand, to cover the disaster and aftermath of the tsunami that took more than 155,000 lives. She reported from Columbus, Ohio, on the late count of Ohio’s contested electoral votes in November 2004. Earlier that fall, she anchored the live coverage of the burial of Yasser Arafat. In the fall of 2003, O’Brien was the only broadcast journalist permitted to travel with first lady Laura Bush on her trip to Moscow.

O’Brien came to CNN from NBC News where she had anchored the network’s Weekend Today since July 1999. During that time, she contributed reports for the weekday Today Show and weekend editions of NBC Nightly News and covered such notable stories as John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane crash and the school shootings in Colorado and Oregon. In 2003, she covered the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and later anchored NBC’s weekend coverage of the war in Iraq. Additionally, in 1998, she traveled to Cuba to cover Pope John Paul II’s historic visit.

Before Weekend Today, O’Brien anchored MSNBC’s award-winning technology program The Site and the cable network’s weekend morning show. O’Brien joined NBC News in 1991 and was based in New York as a field producer for Nightly News and Today.

Before her time at NBC, she served three years as a local reporter and bureau chief for the NBC affiliate KRON in San Francisco. She began her career as an associate producer and news writer at the then-NBC affiliate, WBZ-TV in Boston.

In 2007, O’Brien garnered a Gracie Allen Award for her reporting from Cyprus on the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict as well as her reports from the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. Also this year, the NAACP honored her with its President’s Award in recognition of her humanitarian efforts and journalistic excellence, and she was also the recipient of the American Red Cross of Massachusetts Bay’s 2007 Clara Barton Humanitarian Award. In April of this year, she receive the first annual “Soledad O’Brien Freedom’s Voice Award” created in her honor by Community Voices at the Morehouse School of Medicine. The award, honoring mid-career professionals who serve as catalysts for social change within their fields, will be bestowed upon her for her accomplishments in her field together with her commitment to cover stories that others fail to pursue, and her willingness to be a voice for those in society who are unable to speak for themselves.

O’Brien was part of the coverage teams that earned CNN a George Foster Peabody award for its Katrina coverage and an Alfred I. duPont Award for its coverage of the tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia. In 2006, the National Urban League awarded her its Women of Power award. She also won a local Emmy for her work as a co-host on Discovery Channel’s The Know Zone. She has been named to PEOPLE magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful” in 2001 and PEOPLE en Espanol’s 50 most beautiful in 2004. O’Brien was also included in Crain’s Business Reports’ “40 under 40”, Essence magazine’s “40 under 40” and Black Enterprise “40 Under 40.” O’Brien has been named several times to Irish American Magazine’s “Top 100 Irish Americans.” O’Brien earned the Mickey Leland Humanitarian Award from the National Association of Minorities in Cable in 2006 and has received honorary degrees from Siena College and Mercy College.

She is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

O’Brien is a graduate of Harvard University with a degree in English and American literature.

Eunice Kathleen Waymon, better known by her stage name Nina Simone (February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003), was an American singer, songwriter, pianist, arranger and civil rights activist.

Although she disliked being categorized, Simone is generally classified as a jazz musician. She preferred the term “Black Classical Music” herself. Simone originally aspired to become a classical pianist, but her work covers an eclectic variety of musical styles besides her classical basis, such as jazz, soul, folk, R&B, cabaret, gospel, and pop music. Her vocal style (with a rich alto vocal range¹) is characterized by intense passion, breathiness, and tremolo. Sometimes known as the High Priestess of Soul, she paid great attention to the musical expression of emotions. Within one album or concert she could fluctuate between exuberant happiness or tragic melancholy. These fluctuations also characterized her own personality and personal life, worsened by a bipolar disorder with which she was diagnosed in the mid-sixties, but was kept secret until 2004.[2]

Simone recorded over 40 live and studio albums, the biggest body of her work being released between 1958 (when she made her debut with Little Girl Blue) and 1974. Songs she is best known for include “My Baby Just Cares for Me”, “I Put a Spell On You”, “I Loves You Porgy”, “Feeling Good”, “Sinnerman”, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”, “Strange Fruit”, and “Ain’t got no-I got life”. Her music and message made a strong and lasting impact on African-American culture³, illustrated by the numerous contemporary artists citing her as an important influence (among them Alicia Keys, Jeff Buckley, and Lauryn Hill), as well as the extensive use of her music on soundtracks and in remixes.

Simone was made aware of the severity of racial prejudice in America by her friends Langston Hughes, James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry (author of the play Raisin in the Sun). In 1964, she changed record labels, from the American Colpix to the Dutch Philips, which also meant a change in the contents of her recordings. Simone had always included songs in her repertoire that hinted to her African-American origins (such as “Brown Baby” and “Zungo” on Nina at the Village Gate in 1962). But on her debut album for Philips, Nina Simone In Concert (live recording, 1964), Simone for the first time openly addresses the racial inequality that was prevalent in the United States with the song “Mississippi Goddam”. It was her response to the murder of Medgar Evers and the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four black children. The song was released as a single, being boycotted in certain southern states.12 With “Old Jim Crow” on the same album she reacts to the Jim Crow Laws.

From then onwards, the civil rights message was standard in Simone’s recording repertoire, where it had already become a part of her live performances. Simone performed and spoke at many Civil Rights meetings, such as at the Selma to Montgomery marches.[13] She covered Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” (on Pastel Blues (1965)), a song about the lynching of black men in the South, and sang the W.Cuney poem “Images” on Let It All Out (1966), about the absence of pride in the African-American woman. Simone wrote the song “Four Women” and sings it on Wild Is the Wind (1966). It is about four different stereotypes of African-American women.[3]

Simone again moved from Philips to RCA Victor in 1967. She sang “Backlash Blues”, written by her friend Langston Hughes on her first RCA album, Nina Simone Sings The Blues (1967). On Silk & Soul (1967) she recorded Billy Taylor’s “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” and “Turning Point”. The last song illustrates how white children would get indoctrinated with racism at an early age. The album Nuff Said (1968) contains live recordings from the Westbury Music Fair, April 7th 1968, three days after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King. She dedicated the whole performance to him and sang “Why? (The King Of Love Is Dead)”, a song written by her bass player directly after the news of Dr. King’s death had reached them.[14]

Together with Weldon Irvine, Simone turned the late Lorraine Hansberrys unfinished play “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” into a civil rights song. She performed it live on Black Gold (1970). A studio recording was released as a single, and the song became the official “National Anthem of Black America” and has been covered by Aretha Franklin (on 1972s Young, Gifted and Black) and Donny Hathaway.15

[edit] Later life (1974–2003)

Cover of Simone’s last album A Single Woman (1993)Simone left the United States in September 1970. The continuous performances and decline of the Civil Rights movement had exhausted her. She flew to Barbados, expecting her husband and manager, Andrew Stroud, to contact her when she had to perform again. However, Stroud interpreted Simone’s sudden disappearance (and the fact that she left behind her wedding ring) as a cue for a divorce. As her manager, Stroud was also in charge of Simone’s income. This meant that after their separation Simone had no knowledge about how her business was run, and what she was actually worth. Upon returning to the United States she also learned that there were serious problems with the tax authorities, causing her to go back to Barbados again.[16] Simone stayed in Barbados for quite some time, and had a lengthy affair with the Prime Minister, Errol Barrow.17 A close friend, singer Miriam Makeba, convinced her to come to Liberia. After that she lived in Switzerland and the Netherlands, before settling in France in 1992. Simone’s divorce from her husband and manager can be seen as the end of her most successful years in the American music business, and the beginning of her (partially self-imposed) exile and estrangement from the world for the next two decades.

After her last album for RCA Records, It Is Finished (1974), it was not until 1978 that Simone was convinced by CTI Records owner Creed Taylor to record another album, Baltimore. While not a commercial success, the album did get good reviews and marked a quiet artistic renaissance in Simone’s recording output. Her voice had not lost its power over the years, but developed an additional warmth and a vivacious maturity.[19] Her choice of material retained its eclecticism, ranging from spiritual songs to Hall & Oates’ “Rich Girl”. Four years later Simone recorded Fodder On My Wings on a French label. It is one of her most personal albums, with nearly all of the (autobiographical) songs written by herself. In the 1980s Simone performed regularly at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London, where the album Live At Ronnie Scott’s was recorded in 1984. Though her on-stage style could be somewhat haughty and aloof, in later years, Simone particularly seemed to enjoy engaging her audiences by recounting sometimes humorous anecdotes related to her career and music and soliciting requests. Her autobiography, I Put a Spell on You, was published in 1992 and she recorded her last album, A Single Woman in 1993.

In 1993 Simone settled near Aix-en-Provence in Southern France. She had been ill with breast cancer for several years before she died in her sleep at her home in Carry-le-Rouet, Bouches-du-Rhône on April 21, 2003, aged 70. Her funeral service was attended by singers Miriam Makeba and Patti Labelle, poet Sonia Sanchez, actor Ossie Davis and hundreds of others. Elton John sent a floral tribute with the message “We were the greatest and I love you”.[20] Simone’s ashes were scattered in several African countries. She left behind a daughter Lisa Celeste, now an actress/singer who took on the stagename Simone and has appeared on Broadway in Aida.[21]

Nikki Giovanni is a Black American poet, essayist, and lecturer, whose work influenced many throughout the years of the BAM. Giovanni was born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni, Jr., in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1943. She attended Fisk University where she received her degree in 1967. Giovanni has since further studied at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Work and Columbia University’s School of Fine Arts. In 1970 Giovanni founded a publishing company called Niktom Limited. She now works as a professor in the English department of Virginia Polytechnical Institute.

Giovanni believes that change is necessary for growth. Her poetry is renowned for its call of urgency for Black people to realize their identities and understand their surroundings as part of a white-controlled culture. She is considered a leader in the Black poetry movement. Her collection of poetry, Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgement, captures the militant attitude of the civil rights and Black Art movements of that time. In other works, Giovanni also focuses on her family and personal relationships. She is known for her recordings of her conversations with prominent African-American writers James Baldwin and Margaret Walker. Giovanni continues to write, speak and teach about the history and future of Black people and has become a symbol of the BAM, as well as for Black women and women writers today.

In 1968, Kitt encountered a substantial professional setback after she made anti-war statements during a White House luncheon. It was falsely reported that she made First Lady Lady Bird Johnson cry uncontrollably when in fact, the First Lady replied very diplomatically. The public reaction to Kitt’s statements were much more extreme, both for and against her statements. Professionally exiled from the U.S., she devoted her energies to overseas performances.

During that time cultural references to her grew, including outside the United States, such as the well-known Monty Python sketch (“the cycling tour”) where an amnesiac believes he is first Clodagh Rogers, then Trotsky and finally Eartha Kitt (while performing to an enthusiastic crowd in Moscow). She returned to New York in a triumphant turn in the Broadway spectacle Timbuktu! (a version of the perennial Kismet set in Africa) in 1978. In the musical, one song gives a ‘recipe’ for mahoun, a preparation of cannabis, in which her sultry purring rendition of the refrain “constantly stirring with a long wooden spoon” was distinctive.

In 1984, she returned to hit music with a disco song, Where Is My Man (UK # 34); the first certified Gold record of her career. Kitt found new audiences in nightclubs across the country, including a whole new generation of gay male fans, and she responded by frequently giving benefit performances in support of HIV/AIDS organizations. Her 1989 follow-up hit “Cha-Cha Heels” (featuring Bronski Beat) received a positive response from UK dance clubs and reached #32 in the UK charts.

In the late 1990s she appeared as the Wicked Witch of the West in the North American national touring company of The Wizard of Oz. In 2000, Kitt again returned to Broadway in the short-lived run of Michael John LaChiusa’s The Wild Party opposite Mandy Patinkin and Toni Collette. In 2003, she replaced Chita Rivera in Nine.

One of her more unusual roles was as Kaa the python in a 1994 BBC Radio adaptation of The Jungle Book. Kitt lent her distinctive voice to the role of Yzma in Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove and returned to the role in the straight to video sequel Kronk’s New Groove and the spin-off TV series The Emperor’s New School, for which she won a 2006 Annie Award for Voice Acting in an Animated Television Production. She is currently doing other voiceover work such as the voice of Queen Vexus on the animated TV series My Life as a Teenage Robot.

Kitt in a 2006 photo by Alan LightIn recent years, Kitt’s annual appearances in New York have made her a fixture of the Manhattan cabaret scene. She takes the stage at venues such as The Ballroom and, more recently, the Café Carlyle to explore and define her highly stylized image, alternating between signature songs (such as Old Fashioned Millionaire), which emphasize a witty, mercenary world-weariness, and less familiar repertoire, much of which she performs with an unexpected ferocity and bite that present her as a survivor with a seemingly bottomless reservoir of resilience — her version of Here’s to Life, frequently used as a closing number, is a sterling example of the latter. This side of her later performances is reflected in at least one of her recordings, Thinking Jazz, which preserves a series of performances with a small jazz combo that took place in the early 1990s in Germany and which includes both standards (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes) and numbers (such as Something May Go Wrong) that seem more specifically tailored to her talents; one version of the CD includes as bonus performances a fierce, angry Yesterdays and a live take of C’est Si Bon that good-humoredly satirizes her sex-kitten persona.

Sanchez was a very influential part of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Arts Movement. Sanchez was an advocate for the people. She was a member of CORE (Congress for Racial Equality), where she met Malcolm X. She wrote many plays and books that had to do with the struggles and lives of Black America. Sanchez has edited two anthologies on Black literature, We Be Word Sorcerers: 25 Stories by Black Americans and 360° of Blackness Coming at You.

Sanchez is also known for her innovative melding of musical formats – like the blues – and traditional poetic formats like haiku and tanka. She also tends to use incorrect spelling to get her point across.

In 1969, Sanchez was awarded the P.E.N. Writing Award. She was awarded the National Education Association Award 1977-1988. She also won the National Academy and Arts Award and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Award in 1978-1979. In 1985, she was awarded the American Book Award for Homegirls and Handgrenades. She has also been awarded the Community Service Award from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, the Lucretia Mott Award, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Humanities, and the Peace and Freedom Award from the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

Model, business executive. Born Iman Mohamed Abdulmajid on July 25, 1955, in Mogadishu, Somalia. Iman is sometimes described as her native land’s most famous export. One of the most sought-after fashion models of the 1970s and 1980s, Iman became a successful business executive in the 1990s with her own line of cosmetics. Married to rock star David Bowie since 1992, she became a mother for the second time at the age of 44 in the summer of 2000, but it was just one of many boundaries the enigmatic entrepreneur and social activist has broken in her lifetime.
She found a far more worthy outlet for her talents, however, in 1992, when she convinced the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to let her take a documentary film crew to Somalia, which had been ravaged by war, drought, and famine. Iman decided that her status as Somalia’s most famous expatriate could be leveraged to help raise awareness of the tragedy and bring in more international aid. As she explained to People writer Ron Arias, she set out determined to “let the Somali people speak for themselves. People get numbed when they see picture after picture, year in and year out, of people starving. I wanted to show that they are not a nation of beggars—that culture, religion, music and hope are still there.”
In 1994, Iman launched her own line of cosmetics for women of color. She had long been frustrated by the paucity of products for black skin. “I would go to cosmetics counters and buy two or three foundations and powders, and then go home and mix them before I came up with something suitable for my undertones,” she said in an interview with Black Enterprise writer Lloyd Gite. Teaming with Byron Barnes, a onetime makeup artist who had helped create a previous line of cosmetics for women of color, Iman came up with an innovative product line, and packaged it with her own name and very recognizable visage. The Iman Collection was aimed at all women of color-Hispanic, Asian, Native American, as well as black-and was sold at J. C. Penney stores across the United States. Like her modeling career, Iman’s newest venture was an immediate success, but she soon realized that a company as small as hers did not have the capability to expand. The Iman Collection had neither an advertising budget nor a sales staff, and when its products sold out quickly, it took weeks to restock. Poor planning also hampered the business in the first year—for instance, there were not enough products for Asian skin types in West Coast stores, while too many languished on store shelves in the Midwest. “In the first year, I have found everything that could go wrong in this business,” she told Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service writer Campbell in a 1996 article.

Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama) is an American communist organizer, professor who was associated with the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.Davis’s main association, however, was her membership in the Communist Party USA. She first achieved nationwide notoriety when she was linked to the murder of Judge Harold Haley during an attempted Black Panther prison break; she fled underground, and was the subject of an intense manhunt. She was eventually captured, arrested, tried, and eventually acquitted in one of the most famous trials in recent U.S. history. She is currently Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California and Presidential Chair at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She works for racial and gender equality and for prison abolition. Davis is a founder of the anti-prison grassroots organization Critical Resistance.

As Fürstenberg once explained, “The minute I knew I was about to be Egon’s wife, I decided to have a career. I wanted to be someone of my own, and not just a plain little girl who got married beyond her deserts.”In 1970, with a $30,000 investment, she began designing women’s clothes. (Her former husband became a fashion designer, too, launching his career in 1974.) She is best known for introducing the knitted jersey “wrap dress” in 1973, an example of which, due to its important influence on women’s fashion, is in the collection of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Fürstenberg has started a number of successful businesses including a line of cosmetics and has ventured into the home-shopping business, which she started in 1991. In 1985 she moved to Paris, France where she founded Salvy, a French-language publishing house. From her design and marketing studio in a 19th-century carriage house in West Greenwich Village in New York City, she currently creates a line of high-end women’s apparel which is only offered in stores such as Bergdorf Goodman, Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Neiman Marcus.

In 1997, after more than a decade, Fürstenberg successfully relaunched her high-end line. In 2005, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) awarded her a lifetime achievement award. In 2006, she was named president of the CFDA. In 1998 she published her memoirs, “DIANE: A Signature Life”.

Ali was born in Miami Beach on December 30th, 1977 to Muhammad Ali and his third wife, Veronica Porche. The most famous of The Greatest’s nine children, Laila’s the only one to follow in his footsteps into the boxing ring, On her way to the top, the statuesque, 5’10”, 175 lb. cruiserweight whupped Jackie Frazier, daughter of Joe, in the first Pay-Per-View fight featuring females in the main event.

She hoped to have a showdown with George Foreman’s undefeated daughter Freeda who retired suddenly after taking a pounding from another pugilist in the first loss of her career. Laila currently reigns as the women’s world title holder, having compiled an impressive 24-0 record, including 21 knockouts.

With no credible challengers left, she opted to try something completely different type, ABC-TV’s Dancing with the Stars. She and her partner, Maklim Chmerkovskiy received a perfect score for their rumba, and came in third overall in the popular series’ competition. All the national attention led to recognition of Laila’s feminine side, and she was recently named to People Magazine’s 100 Most Beautiful List for 2007.

The accomplished 29 year-old, now completely out of her father’s shadow, is also the author of a motivational book entitled “Reach!” She often makes public appearances as an inspirational speaker before young women in need of a role model.